LoRa is quickly becoming a new piece of technology to enable long Range transmission of IoT data at low power. WiFi has a very limited range and it’s power consumption is quite high. There are ready made (and kickstarter) modules available in the market. But they are still quite costly. I don’t want to wait until the price drops There modules available but pin spacing is usually too tight for the average DIY’er. reason for me (and I like doing it) is to develop a simple module adapter with onboard power regulation (for 5V) and level shifting to 3.3V vice-versa.

Delen:

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ITeadStudio.com makes nice little TFT screens (up to 7″) that make the HMI (Human Machine Interface) a lot simpler. Instead of having to program a TFT screen just about for each pixel, this lets you design the screen separately and interface through rs232 ttl levels. So far I have tested these screens with ESP8266 and Arduino. But since the protocol is quite simpel any ttl level rs232 device should work. I have tested sofar with baudrates up to 115200 on both hard- and software serial interfaces. more…….

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Time changes and so do embedded chips. Having programmed numerous years on Atmel 8bits, PIC, 6502, Z80 and 80×86 I am now learning the 32 bit. Like probably many of us, you try to get a similar environment like my Arduino/Eclipse setup for all development platforms. Well I tried quite a few options on this one:

MBED.org. Great environment but only available online

MBED exported to Eclipse/gcc. Works fine but still needs quite some tuning

MBED generated from boards.txt & platform.txt. Actually got it working for the Nucleo L152RE. Downloading was done separately through the ST-Link utility. Downside was the rather large code footprint.

MBED generated for EM::Blocks. Now this is quite an efficient compiler. It works as expected

Eclipse. That got me nowhere

Eventually I guess I realized I was postponing the inevitable. I had to restart learning to program for the chip itself. I have a few boards at hand with the STM32F103xxxx and will start with these.

As expected, there is hardly any descent documentation available or even a schematic. So a lot of experimenting is required. Any I guess it is my lack of experience with these processors that definitely need an update. And time to leave Arduino style programming and get into the real deal.

My favourite environment currently is:

EM Blocks as compiler version 2.3

Doxygen is embedded

Version control is embedded

Use standard templates

I am making this a separate menu Item so I can share my experiences (and have a backup for tips and tricks myself).

Delen:

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I made a small example of how to create your own functions into the AT demo enabling you to extend the AT example. Of course there is always a risk that we might (probably) migrate soon to another new version of the SDK. To keep you code somewhat safe erasure, I will make a myFunctions.c and myFunctions.h where our functionality will be put in. The only adjustment to the original source code is the file at_cmd.h which contains an array containing all AT commands.

Just try it out. It is quite simple and straight forward. Have fun… and be imaginative!!!